Jim Friel
Programme Leader of the MA in Writing
Research Interests
I am engaged in exploring pedagogical, interpretive, and imaginative approaches to creative writing. In radio, I specialise in adapting fictions that resist easy dramatisations, those with elliptical and unreliable narrators or maverick, contrary structures. My plays have been broadcast internationally, and are awarded prestigious and highly sought-after time slots in the BBC schedule. Adaptations are acts of interpretation as well as creative works. The texts I chose to adapt are technically ambitious and explore issues of gender, sexuality, and nationhood, and these techniques and issues recur in my own creative work. I have edited an online anthology of gay short stories. My prize-winning stories have appeared internationally in prestigious magazines, have been broadcast, and a collection, The Age of Reason will be published by Bluechrome in 2008. My novel, The Higher Realm, won the Fictionquest Prize and was published in Australia in 2007. My next, A Posthumous Affair, will be published in the US by Tupelo Press in 2008: an international and intertextual romance. My international experience as a teacher of Creative Writing feeds into my pedagogical writings, and I am becoming increasingly interested in the way in which Creative Writing is becoming both the subject and a means of research.
Current Projects
Publications (Selected)
Novels
The Higher Realm (Elsternwick, Victoria: Ilura Press, 2007)
Short Stories
Blind, and Blur, and Tattoo, in An Anatomy of Chester (Chester University Press, 2007)
Say Yes, in In The Red (JMU publication, 2007)
The Nail, the Knife, the Scissors, in Blithe House Quarterly (US) 10.4 (Winter 2006): http://www.blithe.com/
The Age of Reason for Etchings (Elsternwick, Victoria: Ilura Press, 2006)
The Cosmopolitans (BBC Radio Merseyside; first broadcast 25 October 2006)
The Higher Realm, in Boomerang (UK; March 2004): http://www.boomeranguk.com/
M. for Harrington's GM Quarterly (Haworth Press, US, February 2004)
With Gerald of Wales in Ireland, Blithe House Quarterly (US, October 2003); and in Tobias Hill (ed.), Pool 2 Anthology of Short Fiction (West Kirby: Headland, 2003)
A Posthumous Affair, in Pretext 2 Magazine (UEA/Pen&Ink, 2002)
The Character Exam, in Maureen Duffy (ed.), Pool 1: New Writing Out of Liverpool John Moores University (West Kirby: Headland, 2002)
I Come With Her, in Peter Burton (ed.), The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories (London: Robinson Press, 2001)
Radio Adaptations
Remains of the Day, dramatized for BBC Radio 4 from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (8 & 15 Augist 2003; 2 parts)
Snow, dramatized for BBC Radio 3 from the novel by Orhan Pamuk (10 April 2005)
A Pale View of Hills, from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro for BBC Radio 4, in five parts (1-5 August 2005)
A Fairly Honourable Defeat, from the novel by Iris Murdoch for BBC Radio 3 (November 2003)
As I Lay Dying, from the novel by William Faulkner for BBC Radio 4 (August 2000)
Cousin Bette, adapted from the novel by Honore de Balzac in three parts for BBC Radio (April 2000)
Villette, adapted and co-directed from the novel by Charlotte Bronte in three parts for BBC Radio 4 (April 1999)
Saigon: Year of the Cat, adapted from the film by David Hare for BBC Radio 4 (September 1998)
Book Chapters
"'You See, This is My Life': The Worlds of Sunset Boulevard", in Georges-Claude Guilbert (ed.), Literary Readings of Billy Wilder (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 25-42
"Some Notes on Time in Fiction", in Robert Graham (ed.), How To Write Fiction (Palgrave 2007).
Awards
The Higher Realm won the Ilura Press Fiction Quest Prize (2006)
The BBC Merseyside Competition Winner for story on "Change", with specific reference to Liverpool 2008, City of Culture (2006)
The Story South Million Writers Award for Fiction Notable Online Short Stories of 2003 for "With Gerald of Wales in Ireland" (2004)
